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Born at Truro on 31 March 1833, he was son of Francis Hingston (1796–1841), controller of customs there. His mother was Jane Matilda, daughter of Captain William Kirkness.[1]Thomas Hingston was his uncle.[2]

In 1857 Hingston edited the poems of his father as The Poems of Francis Hingeston, edited by his son.[1][2] An early work was Specimens of Ancient Cornish Crosses and Fonts (London and Truro, 1850). Other historical publications followed, but his scholarship was called into question.[1]

In the Rolls series Hingston edited John Capgrave's Chronicle (1858); Capgrave's Liber de Illustribus Henricis (1859), and Royal and Historical Letters during the Reign of Henry the Fourth, vol. i. 1399–1404 (1860). The last volume in particular was heavily especially criticised, and when (now as Hingeston-Randolph) had completed a second volume of it in 1864, collation with the original documents led to the cancelling and reprinting of sixty-two pages and the adding of sixteen pages of errata. Of each version eight copies were kept, but none was issued to the public.[1]

In 1885 Frederick Temple, then bishop of Exeter, made Hingeston-Randolph a prebendary of Exeter Cathedral, and at the bishop's suggestion he began editing the Episcopal Registers of the diocese. Between 1886 and 1909 he completed those of eight bishops of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries (11 pts.). He mainly restricted himself to indexing the contents of the registers.[1]

Hingeston-Randolph was often consulted about the restoration of West Country churches. He wrote Architectural History of St. Germans Church, Cornwall (1903), and contributed articles on church architecture to Building News and The Ecclesiologist. In his articles "Up and down the Deanery", which he contributed to the Salcombe Parish Magazine, he gave a historical account of every parish under his charge as rural dean.[1] He published also Records of a Rocky Shore, by a Country Parson (1876) and The Constitution of the Cathedral Body of Exeter (1887). He was a contributor to Devon Notes and Queries, Notes and Gleanings, and Western Antiquary.[1]

On Hingston's marriage in 1860 to Martha, only daughter of Herbert Randolph, incumbent of Melrose, Roxburghshire, he added, at the wish of his father-in-law, the name of Randolph to his own and adopted Hingeston, an earlier form of the spelling of his family surname. His wife predeceased him in 1904. He left four sons and six daughters.[1]